Photogate setup for LoggerPro 3: to measure instantaneous speed through two gates, and time taken to pass from first gate to the second (lab Gravity and lab Newton’s Laws)

 

  1. Make sure photogates are plugged into LabPro interface. 1st gate that cart will pass through into Dig1.
  2. The photogates can take two different cables. The correct cable to use to connect to the LabPro interface i:s the one that has the clear phone connector on one end, and the white Vernier connector on the other end, as pictured below.

  1. Make sure LabPro is plugged into power and into PC. If the green light is not on on the LabPro, it may not be getting power, sometimes the power cables do not make good connection. An ultimate solution may be to try batteries instead.
  2. Start LoggerPro 3, close any popup window. If the "collect" button stays grayed out, check connections, restart things, but ultimately it may be a bad USB cable.
  3. Choose File-Open-Probes&Sensors-Phtogates-Two Gate Timing
  4. If you get sensor confirm box – choose "connect" twice to confirm connection of each gate
  5. In the middle of the screen, you will see boxes labeled "GateDistance1" and "GateDistance2". Double-click on the number to replace it with the correct diameter of the object that is passing through the gate. You must put the same number in each box. Enter as many decimal places as you know - what shows in the screen will be rounded.
  6. Do a sample run and be sure you understand what each number is and which numbers you need to keep

 

Copying data to Excel:

After each run (after each time you hit “Stop”), select and copy all the data to Excel. Later you can edit it to keep what you need.